There's a slow swelter to "Water is Heavy," the first song on "Inside the Ghost Machine," the debut album from Southboro's Anda Volley. There's a sense of something lumbering toward you.

There's a sort of existential terror in Volley's songwriting, a frenetic, anxiety-inducing quality. You can hear it in the march of electric drums on "Water is Heavy," in the paradoxically sweet and discordant vocals as she sings, "Is something running wild/in your memories?/Maybe you'll find/a trace of salt./There's always a storm/coming."

Inside the Ghost Machine by Anda Volley

The impending storm weighs heavy in the song, the way the air feels thick before a thunderstorm. If there's a sense of loss permeating the song, the loss becomes palpable on the next track, "Laura Inside the Ghost Machine."

"Laura, the dogs are out to (expletive) you," sings Volley, a Siouxsie Sioux-edge lacing her voice, "They're careless howling behind garbage/They're little boys inside sheeps' clothing/While inside you is the fire of a wolf."

There weren't a whole lot of kids' gloves in the first song, but by the second, whatever ones there were are gone. She doesn't even exempt herself from her brutal scorched-earth honesty, singing "It's an evil world your fighting against/I love you, but I'm no better than the rest."

It's easy to get lost in this album. With the mechanistic, electric music on one side, and Volley's poetic, impressionistic lyrics on the other, there's a sort of disorientation happening, a sense as you delve deeper and deeper into the album that you are very, very far from home. "Palm trees and weekends slip by," she sings in "Torch the Countryside." "Juniper fruit and paper glue and exit signs."

The album is full of exit signs. Each one you don't take leads you into stranger territory, deeper down a trip-hop electronic rabbit hole. Beautiful, in its terrifying sort of way, but still maintaining a modicum of humanity … a humanity that largely manifests in heartbreak.

"If I turn into a black rose," she sings, in a song of the same name, "Please don't kiss me goodbye/My heart is a torn letter/My heart is blown away."

Inside the Ghost Machine by Anda Volley

From here, the album descends into heavily surreal metaphoric territory, with songs such as "Star of the Unborn" and "King Yellowman," and in some ways, it's tempting to unpack the language in these songs, but that doesn't seem to be the point.

Lines such as "A vase carries life, ringed with a festival of lights/Obelisk in the cool of night, pointing to starlight," from the former song, uses random images for their immediate emotional impact. (Although lines such as "There's a blue flame over our bed and red tongue splitting the air/Your eyes grow darker when you start tugging my hair" are as self-explanatory as they are evocative.)

This is a trick songwriters from Cream to Procol Harum to David Bowie have used to great effect, the impact of the surreal being carried away by the current of the music. And just in case you're dubious of that assertion, Volley herself gives you a hint in that direction with "King Yellowman," where she sings, "Spin the record like unzipping blue jeans zippers/We like a little boom boom Ziggy Stardust theater."

Indeed.

Also, while "Laura Inside the Ghost Machine" may be the stand out track, "Yellowman" is probably the most fun, a smooth ambient groove to mellow out the nerve-jangling anxiety of the preceding songs.

Inside the Ghost Machine by Anda Volley

While the groove continues into the penultimate song, the gentle "Day Unfolding Within," it doesn't last. "Gentle" isn't this album's natural state, but the sleight of hand sets you up for a reprise of her song "Idol," another version of which appears earlier on the album.

There's something menacing in the song "Idol," the lyrics' words of sweetness and adoration obscuring something dangerous. "You're my idol," sings Volley, "And you remind me/I'm just a piece of paper."

And there it is. In a lot of ways, "Idol" is the simplest song on the album, resting as it does on relatively simple guitar chords and a minimum of electronic manipulation. But it's also one that reveals a sense of inhumanity in the song's persona, a sense of surrendering one's identity to some dark tide. "A glint of amethyst/In your eyes/There's a black ocean/But it's inside."

On its own, there's an ambiguity to the song. In the context of the album, especially when it's refrained, the darkness in it becomes visible. But of course, Volley herself told us this was the case, way back near the beginning, when she sang, "I love you, but I'm no better than the rest."

The scraps of beauty she's pulled from the dark lie tainted on the ground.

And while this is, in its own odd way, a beautiful album, Volley's shown us that beauty is not something to be trusted, that you never know what's lurking underneath.